My family's pictures are our most treasured possession. We would be devastated if anything were to ever happen to them. Our pictures include years of memories from our wedding, honeymoon, births of our two daughters, birthdays, and numerous holidays. If you share our concern, then I hope I can help you by sharing our strategy for backing up our digital
Step1
Best Option - Online Storage. I purchased a Flickr PRO account for $24.95 a year. This allows me to load an unlimited number of pictures to their site. If your concerned about privacy, like I am, then you can set all of your pictures to be private. In my research, Flickr was the least espensive online storage solution for pictures (this could have changed). Online storage keeps your digital pictures safe from your computer crashing, burning, getting a virus, being stolen...etc.Step2
I've also gotten into the habit of backing-up all my documents and pictures onto an external hard drive. This is a good backup solution, but not perfect. A backup hard drive can also fail, is vulnerable to viruses, theft, disasters...and has a limited lifespan.Step3
Burning pictures to CD or DVD is another practice I use for back-up. CD/DVDs have the benefit of a longer lifespan than hard drives, they're not vulnerable to viruses or failures. However, they will not protect your pictures against theft or disasters. In addition, backing up files to CD/DVD can be time consuming. CD/DVDs can take 30 minutes or more to burn.Step4
The final strategy I use for backing up our pictures is from the stone-age... I print them out. 
